writing in the water

Found over at Write Fantastic, and I had to share the pain. But this lovely video started with Dennis Cass. Check him out and buy his book.

Too many ideas and desires for stories, and time simply isn’t there. I can stay up later and later and still not find those extra hours. No matter what happens my hope refuses to stop believing in time–as in lost time, making up time, and the witching hour. Somewhere these magic minutes are hiding, and when I find them, I shall shake them, and they shall shower down over me and my keyboard and ta-da! the stories in my head will escape to the page.

Until then I suppose I will have to type faster. While sleeping.

Three weeks vacation. Unpaid, but vacation nonetheless. Of these three weeks, I’ll get two days to spend writing. Before vacation I had visions of an entire week spent intensely focused on getting this novel done. But life goes how it goes, and I get two days. While I know that if I looked on the bright side of life, I should be happy and satisfied with what works out. I’m disappointed all the same.

Here’s to making the best of things and shedding self-pity!

Bah.

Story writers may not be able to find the path to enlightenment.  Not knowing every writer in the world, I can’t be sure of this, of course, but I do know that I’m disinclined to ditch the baggage if it means leaving my characters on the side of the road.  Where would art come from if not from the past and all that goes into making a writer into the loon that she is?  

Not that we should romanticize the mental state of troubled, creative people.  You can be creative and be sane, but being sane is not the same as being enlightened.

Anyway, I’ve finally been granted time to work on the rewrite, which is not the fastest way to sanity, and may be, in fact, like running in the opposite direction of where I need to be, but either way it’s a journey.

My mother drew caricatures of all her mother’s children, and the drawings were kept in grandmother’s living room for twenty years.

When grandmother died, she left everything to me, including the remaining portraits. One had gone missing, and one had been torn to pieces by my uncle in one of the rages he used to have before he was institutionalized. (He might have continued to have rages, but I certainly was never told.) So, I gave two of my aunts their portraits, even though it pained me to part with my mother’s work, and since I have no contact with my aunts any longer, I expect I shall never see those pictures again, and I kept the last two–the one of my other uncle, who died in a car accident before I was born, and the one of my mother.

In this drawing she did of herself, I’m at her feet along with our favorite dog, Jill. The blank canvas behind her eventually became, in real life, a painting inspired by Middle Earth. That’s what I believe anyway, though the painting no longer exists and I have no proof–although one of the books in the picture is by Tolkien and she had a thing for dragons.

If my mother were alive today, I think she would blog. She’d have a free one at first, and then she would quickly grow frustrated with its limitations and teach herself code. Maybe take a class if she had the money. She’d ask my permission before reading my blog, and probably even suggest that she shouldn’t read it at all so that I could feel free to write whatever I wanted. She tended to worry that she was cramping my style. When I was in high school, she’d offer to drop me off at school functions (I lived with my dad, but she still carted me around) several blocks away. I’d have to reassure her that I was so spectacularly uncool, that being seen with my mother would make no difference whatsoever.

My mother like hoop earrings, fuzzy bathrobes, and large cups of coffee. She kept all her art supplies on the stove, which worked out because she spent her tiny paycheck on paints, pencils, canvas and paper, but not food. In her fridge she kept carrots, apples, and lettuce. Sometimes grapes. In her cupboard she kept melba toast and coffee. If she actually wanted to eat she went to her mother’s house or Wendy’s.

She made me laugh by imitating Tattoo from Fantasy Island. She loved Miami Vice, though she suspected if she had to watch it on anything other than ten-inch, black & white television, she’d change her mind. Because of her mother’s complicated relationship with reality, my mother told the truth no matter what. I didn’t always appreciate this.

She walked out of a job once because the boss changed his mind about letting her leave early–she’d promised to come see me in a school play. Her vocabulary was immense, and she always beat me at Scrabble. At least I always beat her at Clue.

She gave unorthodox advice–compared to the other mothers I knew anyway. She told me that men don’t confuse love and sex and neither should I. She said that the problem with waiting until marriage to have sex was that you could easily and stupidly confuse lust with love.

I wish I could’ve taken her to see Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. Orlando she would’ve ignored. Viggo, on the the other hand…

Happy Mother’s Day.

Maybe you know you’re on the right track. Maybe you’re on a track and are just hoping it turns out to be the right one. Maybe you didn’t even know there was a track but you can see the light from the oncoming train.

Sometimes I see that light and Im not sure if I should lie down across the tracks and wait for the end, meet the metal beast head on, or do the sensible thing and jump out of the way.

Wait–am I confusing the light of the oncoming train with the light at the end of the tunnel? Very possible. This is what happens when you spend too much time trying to think of clever metaphors.

What about you? Does it feel that your novel is about to rip you apart like speeding metal wheel over your chest? Not a pretty picture–and I should know. I’ve seen a herd of cows gutted by a train. Ick. Enough of that.

I just finished working on a scene that hurt. Made me feel cruel. Now, perhaps you’ve been a rebel all your life or you’re so well-adjusted that you don’t know what I’m talking about, but some of us have spent so much time trying to be good and to please and to do the right thing and to be generous and thoughtful that writing a novel comes close being exposed for the frauds that we are. Oh, yes, I believe you really are kind and generous and good, but novels can require showing our very worst thoughts and imaginings. It makes us procrastinate and put things off. Avoid. Ignore. Not write.

At least it does for me. I’m a good girl–how can I write such terrible things? Isn’t it easier to watch TV? I’m not ready to talk about the mean things I do to my characters. What? Am I happy when I do such vicious things? Why, that would be barbaric.

Okay. So it is May. That’s May. As in even closer to Halloween and NaNo 2008. By my calculations you ought to be in the heart of your novel (excuses later please). The terror, the drama, the heartbreak should be before you. Why–you are not lost on a track about to get decimated by a monstrous train–you are the train!

Last metaphor of the night (ha-ha)–you are on track. You know your story. No matter how far you are or aren’t from station where you started, you know where you are going and you can go only one way. Don’t let a herd of cows derail you. Keep going. Keep writing. You’ve got everything you need to get to the end. All you need now is the fire in the furnace to keep you burning forward. So, what fires you up and gets you writing?

Throw some badgers on the flames if you must. You’re a writer–go ahead and be a barbaric.

Warning: tiny badger (remember him–or her–it’s hard to tell) squeals when on fire.

And yes, I may have had a wee bit of sparkling wine before I wrote this. I may be a good girl, but I’m not a saint. Now, GO WRITE THAT NOVEL or tipsy tiny badger will dance on your keyboard and then throw up on the space bar.

Wanting leads to trouble and any number of unfortunate things. But as much as I read about the grief brought on by desire and about acceptance and inner peace and all those very grand things, I still have to admit that I want. More to the point–I want to be a published author. That’s it. Not a bestselling author, mind, but published all the same.

Damn my silly soul, but I want to be a good mother, wife, friend, and teacher–and still be a writer. I don’t want a fancy car or a big house or a name brand anything or a hip cool gadget. One of many problems with wanting to be a writer is how selfish it seems. All those other things that would be great to be good at, are encouraged and approved of. Expected. Who says they want to be a bad mother? See? You have to want to be good at these things.

But writer? Artist? Nobody has to be good at these things. If you don’t have time or energy to write, well, really, who cares? You won’t scar your child, frustrate your husband, disappoint your friend, or baffle your students by not writing. The world doesn’t need another self-obsessed, unbalanced writer. There are a hundred more important things than making up stuff and expecting to be paid for it. Honestly, plenty of people would either be relieved or not even notice if you gave up and threw away all those words you’ve already bothered to put on page.

So, why want to be a writer at all? What is the reward for all the effort and all that you take away from family and friends? A book on a shelf? The frustration of it burns right through me as imaginary people struggle to get out–imaginary people escaping my brain, rushing through my heart, hurtling down my arms and trying to squeeze themselves out through my fingertips as if striking letters on the keypad is the only way out. Out now. But it’s crowded in these fingertips and not every character can get out. They want out but wanting is, well, not an ideal state of mind.

The proof of that is the inanity of this post.

But if they had a pill that blocked the wanting-to-be-a-writer chemical flowing in my brain, would I take it? Would you?

Horoscopes may or may not be true, but they are fun to read either way. Every week I get a free horoscope from Rob Brezney, and while you could argue that each horoscope could be applied to anyone, that doesn’t mean there isn’t something interesting, surprising, insightful, amusing, or downright irritating–all good–to be found. I like this week’s horoscope and its observation about the flow of the river.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt,” wrote columnist Hal Boyle. “It is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.” Your assignment for the rest of 2008, Libra, is to do whatever’s necessary to make yourself fit this description. The next eight months will provide unprecedented opportunities to turn yourself into a river flowing toward your destiny with surprisingly sublime freedom.

Let’s see where I am in eight months…and hey, you could be a river too!

I put off working on my own novel and read about James Frey instead. Vanity Fair has done a story on his life after the A Million Little Pieces fiasco.

I didn’t read his book. I don’t know if I will because life is short and I’ve got hundreds of books on my list already and I don’t read biographies much–fictionalized or otherwise–but this article was worth reading.

Where is that line between truth and fiction (lying) and what a writer owes the reader and what a reader can realistically expect. What struck me most though was the venom people spewed at the man. So, maybe he lied or the publisher lied or maybe they were exactly lying or maybe whatever. But calling him “dung” or “fuck face” is absurd. He wrote a book and got caught lying. Why do people react this viciously? I honestly thought less of the name callers and more of Mr. Frey for enduring it.

But, of course, in my own self-obsessed writer way, I also thought about my own writing. I write fiction, and not thinly veiled autobiographical fiction either. Pure made-up stuff. The lying part isn’t what bothers me. What bothers me is the way people react to something that doesn’t really affect them. Don’t like an author? Don’t buy the book. I find this fairly easy advice to follow. Don’t like to read bad words? Don’t buy the book. Don’t like violence or drug taking or insert-other-moral-failing here? Don’t buy the book.

Bought the book and hated it? Got offended? Well, the other day I bought some grapes and a few didn’t taste very good. Somehow I got through my day without sending hate mail to the grocery store or the growers or the migrant worker who picked them. What is it with people who send hate mail because they don’t like something?

I can be as self-obsessed and centered as the next struggling soul, but I don’t take it personally when a novel or a movie or a song offends or disappoints me. Generally these things don’t require me to take time out of my life and away from my family or my work to write a cruel and ugly letter (or email–I do forget what age I’m living in.).

I’ve been plenty angry plenty of times and I’ve called people names behind their backs. But when I imagine putting those words down in print or on tape and I imagine sharing them the world, I think, you know, the insult just isn’t worth it. I’ll look like a harpy or worse.

But if you want to have that bestselling book, Frey’s is a cautionary tale no matter what kind of book you’re writing. The world loves you, until it doesn’t. Being a successful writer may require more thick skin than talent.